One major common problem faced by cellular and landline service providers is market competition. In today's climate of competitive markets, cellular service providers have found that one way for them to grow market share and defend their businesses is to be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with landline service providers. In addition, cellular service providers seek to differentiate their service offerings, and to capture the largest portion of market revenue by meeting an ever increasing demand for access to a wide range of media forms such as MP3 encoded audio, still and video imaging, data, instant messaging, and email. In a similar manner, the landline service providers have found that to grow market share and ward off competition, they too must be proactive and form alliances, and to partner with cellular service providers. Support for broad economical access to these converging forms of communication is needed to enable unfettered market growth, and to support the development and use of new handheld devices needed to provide increasing levels of mobile multimedia communication functionality.
Although the formation of alliances and partnerships between cellular service providers and landline service providers may help to ward off competition, such alliances and partnerships are faced with other problems. For example, the erection of cellular infrastructure such as cellular towers may be an expensive venture since this may require acquisition of real estate, whether in the form of outright purchases or through leasing. Cellular infrastructure also requires the establishment of one or more expensive backbone links to handle core network traffic. Another cellular-related problem is that the cellular signals do not penetrate and propagate in buildings such as homes and offices very well. This is especially true with the frequencies that are typically utilized in the United States, which may vary between 800 MHz and 1900 MHz or 1.9 GHz.
At the current time, a user of a wireless mobile device such as, for example, a WiFi-equipped PDA, a Bluetooth-equipped cellular phone, or a WiFi-equipped laptop that wishes to access wide area networks such as the Internet must actively seek information via personal acquaintances, websites and printed materials to determine the locations of wireless access points for their use. For example, many fast-food restaurants and up-scale coffee shops currently provide WiFi Internet access, but provide little or no indication on the premises that such services are available. Potential users of communications services, in particular those unfamiliar with an area such as tourists and business travelers, are left unaware of the existence of such points of access, and the services that may be available. They may pass through areas having such coverage while they are, in fact, in need of access to communication facilities. On the other hand, those that operate such areas of wireless service coverage have few tools available to notify users of wireless-enabled devices of the availability and particulars of services that may be accessible. In addition, no efficient means exists to offer access to a variety of media services, or to know whether any potential users of such services are with range of the access points through which they might be made available.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.